The USS Enterprise Explosion of 1969 | Episode 90

Today, we'll be spending the day on board a whole bunch of ships sharing a long and storied heritage. Sadly for us, we're going to spend most of our time on the one that crew members called the mobile Chernobyl. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll see what it feels like to survive something that peeled through six inch steel plates like taffy. In our safety segment, you'll hear the first use of the term in riddlement. And before we're done, we'll boldly go where starships sometimes explode. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would learn about a two million ton aircraft carrier made out of ice. You would hear the story of the early Kamakazi pilot who caused hands down, the most bizarre death in Australian naval history, and you would learn how close we came to building the most unfathomably irresponsible and apocalyptic doomsday weapon ever conceived. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. The name Enterprise carries with it a long and story worried legacy. It is a name steeped with honour and rich with a profound tradition of exploration and a history of technological superiority. A name with nearly unparalleled heritage, a name that has echoed over two and a half centuries of naval history. And we have a lot to cover, so we're going to jump right in. The first ship to bear the name was a Continental Navy sloop or schooner. The Americans, how do I say this, permanently borrowed it from the British During the Revolutionary War back in seventeen seventy five, she was captured by Revolutionary War hero Slash, George Washington's favorite military tactician, Slash, America's worst remembered betrail artist Benedicte Arnold, just outside Lake Champlain and renamed Enterprise. She was originally called George. She sat low in the water. Her hull was narrow and slightly flared at the beam, with the sameingle tall mast with sails rigged front to back. Her rigging gave her a compact, almost crouched look like it didn't trust you. The twelve four pounder cannons and ten swivel guns on deck backed that up. And she wasn't huge like I said. She was roughly the same with as a two lane road and about four and a half dodged caravans. Long had only seventy tons. She was lean, highly maneuverable, and ready to go. She was built for speed, not for collecting beauty pageant trophies. She wasn't long like we said, and neither was her service record. By seventeen seventy seven, she was done. Literally. The most commonly held belief is she was burned or scuttled to prevent being recaptured by the British during the Battle of macaias others say she was just decommissioned and returned to civilian use. Either way, not a very auspicious start to a line of vessels that would go on to bear the news over the next two hundred and fifty years. The next vessel to carry the name was a continental frigate launched in seventeen seventy six, and she was a full dodge caravan, longer than the sloop and had two square ragged masks, displacing one hundred and twenty five tons of water. This was a step up almost twice as big this enterprise, the seventeen ninety nine Enterprise, was a true ocean going warship capable of long distance patrol missions. She was part of a fleet of American vessels that engaged the British at the Battle of Valcore Island in seventeen seventy six, and she saw some pretty fairly intense close quarters combat. Just so it's noted, they were participating in the very first, honest to goodness American naval battle in history, and even though they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned, they managed to stall a British invasion that would have se split the colonies and changed the outcome of the war and the history of America altogether. So no bigie, just the whole reason why Americans didn't refer to the recent Fourth of July Holiday is just Friday. Their little fleet held them off long enough so that they had to retreat for the winter, and this gave the Continental Army time to refortify and learned to punch their opponent's hearts out, which they did later at Saratoga in seventeen seventy seven. So is this why we see the seventeen seventy six Enterprise on the back of the US ten cent piece. Nope. After that battle, most of the fleet looked like it had been worked over by beavers and were burned or scuttled, So they tipped their absurdly large seventeen hundred style fur lined hats and bid the second Enterprise up a bye, but not for long. In seventeen ninety nine, the United States was a thing now they'd won their independence and to help keith it but a new Enterprise was built. This Enterprise was still small by frigate standards, but she had a sleek, narrow hull with a low profile, which made her hard to hit in open combat. She had a reputation for being fast and maneuverable from her time in the War against France and the First Barbary War and the War of eighteen twelve. She also fought and captured the British ship HMS Boxer after a hard fought close range battle in eighteen thirteen. What made that battle so interesting was that both captains were killed. The public was so moved by this that the captains were buried side by side, both with full military honors, in Portland, Maine. She went on to serve as an anti piracy patrol boat, protecting shipping lanes. After that, she was one of the ships that fought the pirates of the Caribbean until she finally ran aground and wrecked on Little Currosau Island. She had served with distinction, kicking a lot of ass during her twenty four years at sea, and that is more than twice as long as most wooden warships of the era even physically held together. This, of course, meant that the name was up for grabs again, and the third vessel to carry the name, Enterprise, was a little different. She set sail in eighteen thirty one, and she was almost fifty percent larger than her predecessors. She was still a big old schooner, but she wasn't intended for trading cannibals. Like her predecessors. She was mainly used for patrolling and escorting vessels on diplomatic missions across the West Indies, the Caribbean, South America, the Mediterranean, and even Africa. That said, she also fought pirates and even took on slave ships. So yeah, she saw a thing or two for nineteen years until she wrecked off the coast of Chile. Her legacy wasn't to help right the history like her forebears, but she did her part to keep on the right side of it. The fourth official US naval vessel to carry the name Enterprise was launched in eighteen seventy seven. This beast was six hundred percent bigger than the last guy, and her size was not the only difference. See she was built at a time when the wooden age of shipbuilding was just starting to be eclipsed by iron hulls. This was a screw sloop of war. It's also called a steam corvette. She still was a wooden hulled, fully rigged vessel with a sharp bow and a long balanced hull, but beneath her traditional sails and rigging lay a steam engine with a single screw propeller, so she was good to go in most any kind of a situation. Speaking of you know how some innovations seem more sensible than others. Well, what if I told you Britain in Canada put there as together during World War two and came up with a plan to build a massive aircraft carrier out of ice and wood pull basically an enormous and reportedly unsinkable battle fortress. Welcome to Project Habit Cook. Haba Cook was a biblical prophet who spoke of great and unbelievable wonders, And they thought a vessel this huge could eat torpedoes all day and host a squadron of planes on top. I should point out their best and brightest minds were willing to entertain any kind of concept at this point, and Winston Churchill himself was a big fan of the plan. He could imagine a whole fleet of these things. So sixty foot long prototype was secretly built in nineteen forty three on the shores of Lake Patricia in Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada. If you were from Jasper, you might be excited or confused to learn about this. The proposed ship would actually be made of pie crete, which is a kind of an ice but it's infused with woodpulp, so it makes it really really strong and shatter resistant and kind of slow to melt too. And amazingly, when they test floated this thing, it held together. Now they just had to scale it up and make a two million ton version of it over two thousand feet long. Engineers don't like to use words like impossible, but here they were, how are you going to build something that big? I mean, how do you even keep something that big refrigerated? And most importantly, what happens when the first bomb hits it and it shatters into eleven trillion pieces. Project Havocuk was quietly shelved and the prototype well, they just kind of left it to melt in Lake Patricia. The fourth Enterprise never saw combat and spent half of her life as a training ship for naval officers. She mostly just conducted oceanographic and coastal star which were vital for future naval and merchant navigation, but not terribly exciting. Hell, this was one of the vessels that would have made an appearance during our Unimac Lighthouse disaster episode, and it's probably entirely because of her modified role as a ship of peace and discovery that kept her unperforated and afloat for thirty years until she was finally decommissioned in nineteen oh nine and sold for scrap in nineteen ten. And thirty years yep, that was a record for Enterprises. The fifth official US naval vessel to bear the name launched in nineteen oh nine as a lighthouse tender for the US Lighthouse Service. Again you remember those guys. Yep. She was basically a kick ass looking motor boat, not quite as large as the last Enterprise, and she tended to lighthouses and boys and kept remote coastal outposts supplied so they didn't have to go crazy and eat each other. And she did this right up until war. World War one broke out. All kinds of non military and civilian vessels found themselves drafted into service. Her new role was conducting patrols looking for German subs and convoy escort duty. She was also the first of her name to be built out of steel instead of wood. She was the first Enterprise to serve during the comparative hell of a more modern mechanized war, even if it only was in a support role, and ships named Enterprise had come a long way from trading canniballs on Lake Champlain. After the war, she went back to her previous duties, but closer to Hawaii hot chot Chaw until she was eventually decommissioned in nineteen thirty and scrapped. The sixth in the line of USS enterprises launched in nineteen thirty six. And she wasn't just a ship. The CV six USS Enterprise was a Mother Yorktown class aircraft carrier. This thing was more than four times the size of anything that came before, and she weighed almost twenty thousand tons. She was twenty nine thousand, nine hundred percent larger than the fifth. In nineteen sixty nine, no navy on Earth came close to matching the military might of the United States at sea. The US owned and operated twenty three commissioned aircraft carriers, while the rest of the world combined had nine. And these were state of the art supercarriers armed with the most advanced aircraft of the Cold War era. They were practically floating air bases, and they were the backbone of American military authority around the world. And they didn't just patrol the oceans, they kind of owned them. Imagine if America had just a bunch of regular old destroyers and warships, and then one day Germany or Russia pulls up off their shore with about the size of a shop helpping mall. America didn't need access to foreign soil to dola war on its enemies. They were the soil. This made them unchallenged and dominant. And these ships had names that reverberated throughout history, the USS Forestall, the Yorktown, the Intrepid, but none captured the imagination more than enterprise. While everything before could maybe hold a few hundred men and some deck guns, this ship carried around three thousand sailors and an air wing of maybe another fifteen hundred, so around forty six hundred men in total, everyone from nuclear engineers to cooks to the on ship barber. They worked eight and slept in the ship's fast mayse of below deck compartments, and most of those on board were barely out of their teens. Now, aircraft carrier does what it says right there in the name, and this one could carry about one hundred full sized planes. And did she do anything else that we might know her for? Well, I'll say this as quick as possible. She helped sink three Japanese aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway in June of nineteen forty two. After the Battle of Guadalcanal in nineteen forty three, she was the last operational US carrier in the Pacific. From there she went on to something called the Great marianas Turkey Shoe during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. She was part of the largest naval battle in history at the Battle of La Tay Gulf in nineteen forty four. By the Battle of Okinawa in nineteen forty five, this ship was one of the used Lady. She had taken more than twenty direct hits from bombs, torpedoes and even kamakazis, and they called her the ship that couldn't die. Speaking of kamakazis, can I tell you the unbelievable story of the very first one. Welcome to the Age, Australia Kamakazi incident of nineteen forty four. Remember a while back we talked about a battle at Leide Gulf. Well, guess who else was there? The Australian Navy hi Mates a heavy cruiser called HMAS. Australia became one of the first Allied ships deliberately struck by a suicidal aircraft attack, and Kamakazi weren't really a thing yet, So imagine everyone's surprise when a Japanese zero that's a fighter jet for you, non military buffs. Well, the pilot of this zero decided they were going to deliberately crash into the ship, and when they hit, their body was hurled through the air, you know, pin wheeling and rag dolling until you remember Newton's first law of motion, an object emotion stays emotion unless acted upon by an external force. Well, Emil de Cheneau, commander of the entire Australian Task Force, was on board that day, standing at attention watching the attack till the pilot's flailing corpse impacted him directly. I was gonna describe it like he speared the guy like something out of an old Wu Tang movie, you know, striking with both fists outstretched and a roar in his throat, oh and flying about two hundred miles per hour. Debris and fire from the impact of his plane did wound and kill several other crew members, but the commanding Admiral being spear tackled into the afterlife in the flailing limbs of his enemy is the most bizarre thing I've ever heard. The ship survived and kept fighting, and rear Admiral des Cheneaux became the only flag officer in naval history killed by an airborne body. By the end of the war, she had sunk seventy one ships and shot down over nine hundred aircraft. She left as the most decorated ship in all of World War II. They say she was the heart of the Pacific Fleet during the darkest days the US Navy ever faced. She was finally decommissioned after the war. I mean she had been blown up twenty times by now, So where do you possibly go from there? Well, this is honestly a little embarrassing, a bit like transitioning from an ice cream cart to an RV. The seventh vessel to carry the name Enterprise, she was more of a floating city. The name Enterprise was a vessel in name only. Compared to her direct predecessor, she was almost forty percent longer and almost three hundred and fifty percent bigger overall, and she held more than double the crew of the last one meet the CBN sixty five USS Enterprise eight point zero the longest warship ever built. At the time, they called her Big E and she launched in nineteen sixty And when you ask most people who their favorite captain of the Enterprise was, it takes a very spece secial kind of nerd to say Captain Kent Lee. Under his leadership, the Enterprise supported air operations in the Gulf of Tonkin and served as flagship when North Korea captured the USS Pueblo in nineteen sixty eight, just the year before. According to everyone, Captain Lee was decisive and principal and felt a deep commitment to both his crew and the Navy. As ships go, Enterprise was so big and so complex it had no peers. They really wanted to build a whole bunch of these, but no one has pockets that deep, So Enterprise remained one of a kind and became her own distinct aircraft carrier class. Enterprise class. It's a little like being your own postal code. And it wasn't just all that booty that made her unique. She was the world's first combat ready nuclear powered aircraft carrier. And she didn't just have one or three, but eight Westinghouse A two W nuclear reactors on board. She had two nuclear reactors for each propeller shaft, and this whole setup put out about three hundred thousand horsepower. So imagine a ship the size of a neighborhood doing thirty knots, which is about thirty five miles or about fifty five kilometers, and she could do this for twenty years before refueling. Now, when I try to think of the weirdest engineering concepts of all time, I usually start with the military. They've been trying to jam nuclear power into every kind of vessel that you can imagine, And one stands out for is absolutely reckless abandon for any rational environmental and ethical or moral or humane consideration, for its utterly catastrophic environmental potential, and the hubristic, barbaric insanity of even conceiving such a thing on paper. And I'm going to tell you all about it. It was the slam or Project Pluto, and for those who know about this, it is widely considered the most bizarre and terrifying an impractical nuclear powered device ever seriously developed. So what was it? All? Right? Try to imagine a nuclear powered ramjet propelled cruise missile designed to fly about thirty seven hundred kilometers or twenty three hundred miles per hour at tree top level, zigzagging across the country, spewing an unbroken field of highly radioactive exhaust gases from its unshielded nuclear reactor. It's basically history's most lethal and irresponsible crop duster. Its low altitude, flight path and speed mean it basically devastates every forest and building, in person and dog and fish that it passes. Ouh, And the constant shock waves coming off this thing because of the speed, would shatter windows and injure everyone and everything on along the way. But wait, it gets better. It doesn't just forever irradiate whatever it flies over. It carries multiple nuclear bombs in its payload, and each one of them they can just drop them anywhere along the way, just deploy them over whatever targets they like. But wait, it gets even better. After you drop all your bombs. This thing it's still a nuclear powered cruise missile, which means it can fly basically forever, just circling the globe infinitely, turning an entire latitude of the Earth into an inhospitable band of a radiated post apocalyptic abandoned with every fresh pass. But if the entire forty fifth parallel became the Chernobyl exclusion zone, so you see what I mean. It was intended to be used as America's ultimate you dead hand weapon. If America was ever destroyed by an enemy nation, the SLAM could just go go on to poison the rest of civilization as a parting gift, and because of its ridiculous speed and low altitude, this would make it damn near impossible to shoot down. The only way this hypersonic apocalypse ends is with a self destruct order, and without that it just goes on forever, almost because on a long enough timeline, the craft would eventually lose structural integrity and disintegrate, scattering unspeakably radioactive debris, including but not limited to the reactor core, across the landscape at four times the speed of sound like YACHTSI dice. So yeah, dumber than a tank, dumber than a snowmobile or a submarine or a satellite of all the things with a nuclear heart ever devised. The SLAM nuclear fertilizer multiple warhead cruise missile is by every measure, the worst life on board. Enterprise was dictated by nearly round the clock launches and landings and fuelings and ordnance and training schedules. This was a floating twenty four hour city where rising before dawn loses all meaning sailors and airmen work in shifts that bleed across day and night. This place ran on cafeteria, coffee, and jet fuel, launching more than one hundred flights per day, and it is run by thousands of people, each with their own roller duty, each like a cog in a machine the size of several city blocks, all designed to deliver war anywhere in the world. Let me just grab a clipboard off the bulkhead here and see where we're going. Well, okay, we just left Pearl Harbor and we are on our way to Vietnam. Don't forget your travel points card. This is our fourth trip and sadly, we won't be doing any shopping or touristy stuff during our visit. We've been helping bomb the place since the end of nineteen sixty five, but we've got to cover about five thousand nautical miles first, so we're going to be doing some of opirational readiness inspections and battle drills, you know, standard deck drills and ordnance loading procedures. Because the captain is quite insistent on battle readiness drills, and our story takes place January fourteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Enterprise was sailing under comb skies about seventy miles or one hundred and ten kilometers southwest of Pearl Harbor. Flight deck operations had been underway since before the sun broke over the Pacific, preparing for an eight thirty launch. Flight ops usually ran from before dawn till well after dusk, a small rainbow of duty staff preparing aircraft for the day's first sorties. Yellow shirts guided jets into position, Green shirts ready to launch catapults, while purple shirts or grapes handled the refueling. And then there were the crash crews and the medics that stood by for any ugliness. They mostly just wore Hawaiian shirts. Below decks, red shirts booth bombs, rockets, and mississ from windowless steel compartments deep in the ship's belly to elevators that rose to the hangar and flight decks. This won't mean much if you didn't grow up building model planes and bottles, but the Enterprise held all kinds of fighter aircraft in a massive, multi level hangar deck below the flight deck and they were all just elevatored up as needed. F four Phantoms, A seven Corsairs, RA five CE Vigilantes. They even had a refueler tanker and one of those E two A Hawkeyes with the massive circular radar dome mounted on top like a UFO or a spinning pancake. It's an early warning aircraft. These would be the final battle drills on the last day of the operational Readiness inspections. Phantom twos, to be exact, were being armed and hooked up to Hoffers. The HELLSA Hoffer you ask well. See, these fighter aircraft were designed to max out on their payload, so every pound saved could mean one pound of explosives. So to save weight, these jets didn't come with their own onboard system for starting their own engines. They needed to be connected to a portable jet starter unit or a huffer that blows hot compressed air into the jet engines to spin them up to a speed where fuel can be introduced and then ignition. A little like old cars, they need a little hanging to get them going. Now, one of the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs in the Navy was installing ordinance on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. This was red shirt work. So imagine working inches from jets racing past you with all the noise and exhaust, and meanwhile you're juggling live bombs, missiles and rockets on a pitching carrier deck on one of the most dangerous workplaces on Earth. Oh and the temperatures on the flight deck easily reach into the high nineties under the afternoon sun. They say you could feel it through the soles of your boots, and the jet exhaust only made it worse. It's a high stress, high tempo job that relies on hand signals and calm nerves or nts. Teams fueled up phantoms and corsairs and rolled bomb carts across the hot steel deck, and that deck was almost seventy dodge caravans long. Each of those bombs being loaded will leave behind a fifty foot crater and dead people for another two hundred and fifty feet of blast radius. Each Phantom was loaded with four Mk thirty two Zuni rockets, two external wing tanks of JP five fuel, and six Mk eighty two five hundred pound bombs. Now, the Zuni rockets aren't quite as powerful as all that. They're only about six feet long and maybe five inches in diameter, and they only carry about twenty pounds of explosive. They were good for blowing up people and vehicles out in the open, and radar stations and surface to air missile installations and just other planes while they're still parked on the ground. Think of it kind of like the thing that blew up the Death Star. But that's a different franchise. We're spending our day to day with Fighter Squadron VF ninety six, also known as the Fighting Falcons. The F four J Phantom twos have a muscular, broad shouldered look with twin engines and a long nose and angular engine intakes. It wasn't a light or a nimble dog fighter. It was no frills. It was all function, and it was built tough enough to withstand the stresses of regular carrier launches and landings. If the new Doomsday Command Center and mobile studio try to carry your landing, I firmly believe it would explode. It was just after eight hundred and several aircraft were now fully fueled, armed and ready to launch. Carryer decks are dangerous places like I said, so we'll keep out of the way. Here by phantom number one thirteen on the port quarter of the flight deck, just outside the landing area jetsovin Park knows to tail and tight formation on the deck. There's no shade on the ocean, and man is it hot eight thirty And those huffer units only make things worse. There's one hooked up to one thirteen right now. They were gas turbine powered and the exhaust blasting out of them get hit up to six hundred degrees fahrenheit or three point fifteen celsius. Our huffer was seated on the starboard side of one thirteen and thankfully pointing away from us. Instead, it was venting exhaust only a few feet from the starboard wing of nearby aircraft six twelve, and that wing was currently home to a pod of four Zooni rockets and were not the first to notice. A few deckands already mentioned it to nearby ordnance chiefs and other personnel. But a flight deck is a busy and noisy place, So I'm going to suggest that we all take several steps backwards, because by eight nineteen, one of six twelve rockets quietly cooked off and then exploded. The detonation ripped straight up through the heart of the launch area. Shrapnel ruptured everything across multiple levels of the ship, including the fuselages and the fuel tanks of the rest of VF ninety six. Flames engulfed the forward section of the flight line, and an orange fireball, indubated by smoke enveloped the apt flight deck, while survivors ran from a rain of airplane parts, hot metal, and flames. Now JP five, or Jet Propellent five, is a kerosene based jet fuel used primarily by the US Navy, and it has a strong, hard to ignore petroleum odor. And we know this because it is currently gushing by our feet. The plane bursts into an inferno, and a minute later, three more Zuni rockets on board one oh five cooked off, detonated, and added to the horror. Each blast sent shockwaves through the hull. Hatches were blown inward, catwalks buckled, and sailors nearest the impact were thrown back by the force of the blasts. Some found themselves flying overboard. Fifteen aircraft had been immediately destroyed. Fire was everywhere on the deck, in the catwalks, and pouring down into the hangar. Bay. It poured in through holes punched in by the explosions, which acted like a drain for all of that flaming fuel to get into the lower decks. Pressurized foam cannons, CO two lines and seawater hoses were dragged across the flight deck, but they'd been ripped to pieces by flying shrapnel. Fire spread from plane to plane, and at one point eight thousand pound bomb detonated beneath and tossed a jet pirouetting through the air like it was a toy. Debris and shrapnel rained down across multiple levels of the ship, and the men fought to keep their footing as the deck buckled beneath them. On the plus side, the fact that their boots were melting kind of gave them mild spider powers. The temperature exceeded twelve hundred degrees fahrenheit or six hundred and fifty celsius. Crews dropped whatever they were doing and focused entirely on this. Others were on fire and more focused on that. Enterprises damage control teams fought to prevent the fires from spreading through the ship's interior, and everyone knew this is the kind of thing that could easily doom a ship, and no one has made a point about fire meeting up with nuclear reactors. Yet. They sealed off compartments and activated sprinklers and used fog foam to beat back the flames as best they could while fire continued to pour in through bomb holes. The wounded moved feebly across the deck, while others lay eerily still. Others were below decks in compartments that turned into lethal traps. When the fire and smoke rushed in up in the carrier bridge, the captain ordered the ship turned into the wind. He wanted to use it to blow smoke and flames away from choking out the bridge and the flight operation center. As burning fuel poured deeper into the ship, ladders and decks and bulkheads became too hot to touch, and at eight twenty two another one of the five hundred pound bombs detonated, which put an eight x seven foot hole directly underneath it. The blast ruptured hoses and eight firefighting equipment foam dispensers, basically everything they needed to fight the blaze, oh and ear drums. Shortly after, two more Mk eighty two bombs detonated back to back, which ignited a bomb rack holding three more five hundred pound bombs, sending lethal fragments frisbeeing across the decks. It wasn't just flaming hot shrapnel. Flaming hot m and cannon shells had also been cooking off in all directions, perforating sailors and fire hoses. Bravery was on display everywhere. One officer thoughtlessly threw himself onto a burning man to help extinguish the flames. Other less fortunate sailors were disintegrated entirely by the actual explosions themselves, of which I have now lost count To all appearances, the enterprise was at war with itself. Sailors dragged the wounded to relative safety and tried to continue the fight. Oh but I should mention all of this was happening right next to a fully loaded KA thirty five fuel tanker plane, which just happened to be carrying six thousand gallons of jet fuel at the time, and the results of that disappearing left an eighteen x twenty two foot jagged hole and a colossal fireball up to one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty feet in diameter. The blast peeled through deck plates, six inches thick like they were taffy, and the deck below that, and the deck below that the gas and gulf, multiple aircraft and entire damage control teams. In an instant, Men ran as fire seemed to rain from every direction, waving their arms over their heads, trying not to burst into flames. As more fuel tanks ignited and more warheads exploded. Everywhere was chaos, and in spite of it, sailors just kept rushing forward to pick up a hose and keep fighting the blazes. Many of the crew got to the very careful work of rolling the bombs off the deck, plunking them into the ocean so that they couldn't make anything worse. Even planes were pushed overboard, and it was about this time that the destroyer USS rogers sidled up close to them and started springing or down with their deck hoses, which certainly was appreciated. Medical teams triaged and treated burn and blast victims by flashlight on charred decks in the hangar and sick bay. Injuries ranged from serious burns and smoke inhalation to broken bones and lacerations and shrapnel wounds. So you find yourself stunned by an explosion, and it turns out one of your hands has been cut off by a piece of shrapnel, so you pick it up with your other hand, and now that one gets removed, And all of this right before a wave of burning fuel crashes over your head like you're the coach of a football team. Would you know what to do? Well, let's quickly review personal safety aboard a carrier and see what we can do about not getting you immediately killed. First, stop, drop and roll and roll and roll and roll as much as you need, using your body to smother any flames that may be calling you daddy. The ignition point of various clothes and uniforms changes, but cotton fabric can burst into flames at seven hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheiter four hundred celsius. But if your clothes have been exposed to any kind of fuel vapors, that could drop as lowest four hundred and eighty degrees Fahrenheiter two hundred and fifty celsius. The point of stopping is because running only feeds flames. The pin dropping is because this only works while laying down flat, and it also protects your airways from flames. Just make sure you don't roll over any puddles of fuel JP five like we were talking about, can burn hot enough to light steel on fires. So if you're already ankled deep in the stuff, it's time to climb to a higher deck or a catwalk or an awaiting helicopter would be great. Anywhere above the fuel line is where you want to be. And the last thing about stop, drop and roll, don't accidentally roll overboard. When I said roll and roll and roll, it's more customary to roll back and forth to smother the flames, not nus straight line. Your speed should be deliberate and continuous, just fast enough to smother the flames, but controlled enough to stay in contact with the ground and cover all the burning areas. And on this flight deck though, you're gonna want to do this as far from any open flames as possible, and not for the obvious reasons of you know, already being on fire, but because metal surfaces could be hundreds of degrees, causing anything from additional burns to the rapid stripping away of layers of your skin and muscles like a fruit roll up, if you get the reference. Now we're delivering this safety segment on the flaming, exploding deck of an aircraft carrier. And I've heard shrapnel described as nature's surprise gift bag. It gets into it everywhere, and if it's getting into you, we're not triaging or removing it here on deck. First thing we're doing is hiding. We're putting as many surfaces as we can between us and the source of this new in riddlement. Next, don't panic. You want to apply pressure to the wound and get the hell out of there. Anytime you're taken flack or shrapnel, you're gonna treat it like you're being sniped at by an unseen enemy, because you are. And if you found you've become host to shrapnel, there's always room for more. Keep that pressure on it to control bleeding, and find as much cover as you can. Unless the shrapnel is blocking your airway or it's too big to fit through a hatch, just leave it. You ever heard the term catastrophic bleeding. Removing it could dislodge clots or expose open severed blood vessels. Just understand, you pull a thing out of you and you might find yourself on a clock. And I can't tell you how long it's going to last, So, like I keep saying, keep pressure on the wound. If it's bleeding and life threatening, you know, I'm going to tell you to apply a tourniquet two to three inches above the wound, but making sure that it's between the wound and your heart, if that makes sense. The trick here is to stem the bleeding without killing the limb. Not too loose, but not too tight. And if your wound is somewhere weird like your neck, or you're growin where trying to tie it off is awkward, or we'll just straight up strangle you, pack that wound with whatever is clean and keep the pressure on. And ironically, there's a version of this situation where a real pro just grabs a piece of flaming debris and cat arises and seals their own wound right there and then. But my advice on shrapnel is always going to be you don't know what you don't know, so just don't touch, look with your eyes. The good news is you're on a military aircraft, they can probably toss you a morphine autoinjector for the pain. And you surely know I'm going to tell you always know where your nearest hatch is. Every second counts, and at absolute worst, if you're cut off from escape, you can go straight over the side, but if you do, hold your nose, try to go and feed first, cross your ankles, and tighten your butt. Salt water obviously burns a lot less than jet fuel, but it can also irrigate your colon if you're not careful. You just survived a carrier explosion, and the last thing you want to do is drown while trying to choke down your reverse prolapsed colon. Many of the burn victims would endure grueling treatment and long recoveries. The ones unbroken expanse of the flight deck was now ruptured by giant holes blown straight through six inch thick plate armor like it was melted plastic, and it looked like melted plastic where it had punched through. Portions of the stern steel structure were peeled back and twisted from the explosions. The aft section of the deck was ripped wide open. When I said it looked like the US Navy was attacking itself, it appears both sides fought very hard. The fire was brought under control after forty minutes, and it was finally dead by lunch eighteen different explosions had perforated the deck. Eight F fours, six A sevens, and one unfortunately completely filled Eka three B tanker had been destroyed. Many of those who died had been killed by the secondary explosions as they rushed to fight the fire. As many as three hundred and forty crewmen had been injured, most with severe burns, blast injuries, and smoke inhalation. Twenty nine ordnance crewmen, firefighters, and flight deck personnel had served their final shift. So what happened, well, I can say for sure. The Huffer technician was the first to die. The pilot aboard that exploding F four was a very very close second. Most others died fighting the fire or were caught up in it before they could even help. Others found themselves trapped below decks and died there. Within minutes of the first explosion, Enterprise's flight deck was replaced with smoke and fire and bending steel and burning. Aircraft Men braved the searing geat to rescue shipmates in spite of the flames and the smoke from the occasional missile or bullet or other projectile whizzing by. Sailors had been blasted and burned and dazed. But instead of evacuating, they grabbed a hose and they got to work. Deep black smoke billowed and could be seen for miles. And fortunately, ninety six percent of the crew and eighty six percent of the air wing personnel on board had some formal firefighter training. Life below deck had been a different kind of terrifying. All your hearing are explosions that absolutely rock throughout the ship. The lights are out, hatches are jammed, Smoke is everywhere, and it is at least thirty degrees hotter from your point of view. All you know is that the flight readiness inspection cannot be going that well. The men below decks made an executive decision and flooded the AMMO magazines with seawater. This was no doubt a difficult and expensive and irreversible decision, but it most likely saved the entire ship. If the fires have been able to spread further into the ship's magazines or the reactor compartments, this would have been a much, much, much longer episode. As it was, the steel structure of the ship had been warped, the deck elevators were toasted, and fifteen aircraft had been reduced to smoldering parts. The USS Enterprise limped back to Hawaii under escort and spent fifty one days in the shop like my car. And she left with a bill for one hundred and twenty six million dollars. And you might be thinking, well, that's not so bad. That's closer to a billion today. And while she was on her way, the Coastguard and Navy searched more than a quarter million miles of ocean, but they found nothing and no one to save, likely thanks to the USS Bainbridge that had already rescued a number of sailors who had been blown overboard. The USS Rogers was also praised for her aggressive gumption helping fight the deck fire. And when all was said and done, the inevitable Board of Inquiry produced a kind of a Shit Happens report. Sailors admitted they knew how dangerous the huffer heating units could be, but the investigators found that safe distances between huffers and armed explosives were either not followed or just not understood. A junior airman apprentice tried to call attention to the situation early on, but investigator said he was either misunderstood, not hurt at all due to the noise, and they determined it was most likely at that point too late to have changed anything anyways. Other carriers in the fleet had had near misses with Huffer exhaust before, but none of those had turned lethal, thankfully, which is surprising because the investigation also pointed out just how badly Zuni rockets did in the heat, and while different ships had developed different workarounds for the problem to make things safer, they'd never really been shared or discussed, and nothing had ever turned into a fleet white policy that could have prevented the accident. The rest of the report revolved around recommended preventive actions for the future, mostly increase in training. They recommended more foam hoses and portable extinguishers and expanding fire suppression systems on flight decks. Case in point, and this would have been great, but afterwards they developed a flight deck washed down sprinkler system. This thing would unleash a deluge of water and foam spreading across the flight deck at the push of a button. Flight crews, deck crews, ordnance handlers, and support teams were trained up on jet blast hazards, the heat limits of different weapons, and to know when to respond to a fire and when to just get out of there. This was the guidance that we still enforce today. They also improved protective clothing and breathing apparatus for firefighters, and developed new emergency response protocols for different scenarios. And they didn't just write it all down, They preached and practiced it. Oh, and huffers would be redesigned so that the exhaust vents pointed upwards. In the end, there were no criminal charges. Responsibility was a group effort, so blame fell on the chain of command and their institutional practices. Let me say the waffle house was more prepared for a tornado than the U. S. Navy had been for this kind of accident. Various people received procedural knocks on their records, but that was all. Captain Lee was praised for his calm and effective command of the situation. Damage control. Readiness was his middle name. Actually it was Liston, but the point remains. His emphasis on training and leadership saved countless lives that day, and his discipline had come at no small cost. It was forged in his mind from the lessons learned from sister ships who had suffered devastating fires. Before her, there was a fired aboard the US s Laity in nineteen fifty three that killed thirty two men, a fire aboard the USS Bennington in nineteen fifty four killed one hundred and three, a fire aboard the USS Ariscani in nineteen sixty six killed forty four, and a fire aboard the USS Forestal in nineteen sixty seven quite famously killed one hundred and thirty four and nearly killed another one hundred and sixty one, but that's a different story. Captain Lee went on to serve as Vice Admiral of the Navy and leader of the Naval Air System's Command. This is another in a very long line of bad Day at Work episodes where another routine day suddenly became an unimaginable nightmare. Amazingly, by March the first of nineteen sixty nine, less than two months after the disaster, USS Enterprise was patched up and able to get under way and rejoin the fleet in Vietnam. Each of the names of the dead is now engraved on plaques and trips mutes, honoring their sacrifice in service to their ship and country. For the survivors, many carried physical and emotional scars for the rest of their lives. Some were tormented by memories of shipmates they couldn't save. Others found themselves shell shook by being in such close quarters with that many explosions. But over time these men found support in each other, unloading painful memories only the men there could truly understand. One survivor said, as awful as it was, the fire forged bonds that have lasted a lifetime. Their preparedness and heroism kept a terrible situation from becoming an even larger catastrophe that might have sunk the ship or a radiated part of the Pacific. The Navy didn't hide from this tragedy or simply chalk it up to bad luck. It investigated, it learned, and it implemented changes so that those lives lost could save us in the future. It is often said that every procedure in the Navy's safety manuals is hard earned, wisdom gained from sacrifice and written in blood. In the more than fifty years since, no US carriers has suffered anything close to what happened here today. Enterprize itself went on to serve for over fifty years, having served in everything from the Vietnam War and the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Gulf Wars and even post nine to eleven operations, and that made her the longest serving aircraft carrier in US history. Some called her the Gray Ghost because of her perceived unkillability, but after fifty years of service and radioactivity, others called her the mobile Chernobyl, and she was decommissioned in twenty seventeen and handled with tongs. But and this is no spoiler, we are not done with the name Enterprise. It is quite possible that the most popular use of the name Enterprise was set in the far flung future, hundreds of years from now. I don't know how old you are, but if you were watching TV back in nineteen sixty six, he may have come across a little action packed space based soap opera called star Trek. In the early nineteen sixties, a man named Jean Roddenberry developed the concept for a scientific fictional series set in the future where humanity explored the stars as a member of a confederation of light minded planets, flying around space and using a naval like command structure called star Fleet. Roddenberry had been a pilot back in World War Two. He flew eighty nine combat missions for the Air Force before becoming a commercial pilot, and then a police officer, and then a screenwriter. And he wanted his starship to have a name that evoked the spirit of exploration, and chose Enterprise specifically because of its rich naval history. He said the name had quote a feeling of continuity of ships that had explored before, of duty and daring. He saw it as the namesake of centuries of exploration and defense, but just set in space by the time humanity started catching up with his vision. The first of America's Space Shuttle orbiters, which was constructed for testing but never actually got to fly into space sadly, was originally supposed to be named the Space Shuttle Constitution in honor of the USS bi centennial, but in nineteen seventy six NASA found themselves surprised by a massive letter writing campaign by fans of the show. They were able to persuade then President Gerald Ford into renaming it Enterprise instead. Roddenberry's first ship, the original USA Enterprise NCC one seven zero one, was a Constitution class starship launched in twenty two forty five and was famously captained by James T. Kirk. That was until twenty two eighty five. Long story short, she found herself being boarded by Klingon forces under the command of an otherwise delightful man named Kruge. Actually, I have to take a step backwards. Kirk's best friend Spock had just died of radiation poisoning, and they had fired his body in a torpedo into space, where it gently came to rest on a patch of ferns on a super contested mystery planet called Genesis, which is its own story. And it turns out Spock didn't die after all, so they did the only thing they could. They stole the ship, which had also just gotten its teeth kicked in by a genetically engineered superhuman named Khan Noonian Singh, who was mad because he had been left to die on a place planet full of earworms by Kirk and vowed a deep and heartfelt revenge that nearly killed them all. Anyways, the point being fast forward a little bit, and now Kirk's son, who he had just met for the first time, got stabbed by the same Klingons who were now pouring onto his ship. Now, when it came to handling intruders, Kirk was normally known for negotiating or even just tricking them into leaving. He once successively out argued a killer floating robots that humans were garbage to the point where it control all deleted itself. Every now and then he would threaten someone, but by twenty two eighty five he was too old for this. So they snuck out the back door while the Klingons were beaming in from the front, and left them so that they could have a conversation with Enterprise's computer about the self destruct sequence. A mass of explosion tore through the Enterprise, erupting outward from the saucer section, which began disintegrating in a brilliant fireball that burned as it fell into the atmosphere of the Genesis planet. Now, one may have argued that she did blow up real good, but with enough buffering and hammering, we could maybe make something out of this. But all of that went out the window when the planet itself finally exploded. Kirk had given up everything, his command, his ship. He gave up everything to save the lives of his friends and crew. But they weren't done. From there, they carjacked a klingon bird of Prey and slingshot it around the Sun to travel back in time, all to abduct some whales just to show up some malevolent alien tube from the future. When all of that was done, instead of beheading Kurt and court martialing his headless torso, they gave him the keys to a brand new u u SS Enterprise NCC one seven one A that booted around the galaxy until twenty two ninety three, when she was decommissioned and converted for mothball storage. She was replaced by the Enterprise B, on which Kirk was almost immediately killed during its maiden voyage by a kind of benevolent space ribbon. But don't worry, he didn't really die. He was sent to a magical horse pasture to cook breakfast, while the B went on toodling around the galaxy without so much as loosening a tooth for decades until she was finally retired and replaced by the Enterprise C, which launched in twenty three thirty two. Now, the thing about the Enterprise C is, after having screwed up the timeline, she was shoved backwards, face first through a portal in space into an alternate reality in hopes that she would be destroyed and everyone on board would die at the Battle of Narendra three in twenty three forty four, And it was, and they did. This was followed by a lull where no doubt they were beginning to wonder about ships named Enterprise getting up to weird, weird stuff. But by twenty three sixty three, the Enterprise D was launched a Galaxy class starship. She was famously captained by Jean Luc Picard, and she had a fairly memorable run, you know, saving reality, falling in love, having hollow neck adventures, that kind of stuff, until twenty three seventy one, when she went on to visit a planet called Veridian three. You know who else was visiting Veridian three that day? Remember that space ribbon that killed Kirk Yep, same one. You know who else? Two Klingon sisters, and one mad scientist who used Enterprise's engineer as a kind of an eyeball walkie talkie to help torpedo their warp core right through their own shields. It was a busy afternoon. The Enterprise got off a lucky shot that blew them up instead, but with the warp corp going crazy and budget allowing. They evacuated everyone to the saucer section of the ship and detached it like a lifeboat, and it is supposed to do that. I don't remember if anyone had done it in about eight years, but it protected the crew while the rest of the ship exploded for maybe a minute. When the resulting shockwave hit them, it hit them hard and the saucer section crashed onto the planet's surface. People would have had their organs displaced as their legs and hips were shoved up into their torsos and abdomens, or their legs would have knotted behind their heads while they defecated organs from the impact. The last we heard, damage reports were coming in from all over the ship and casualty reports were still being compiled, but it was never followed up on. I hate to say it, but the death toll from the USS Enterprise Arridian three disaster of twenty three seventy one was covered up by Starfleet looking Forward. Literally, the only mention of the fate of the Enterprise E was from a klingon outcast raised by Belarusians on Earth, who said, whatever happened to it, it wasn't his fault. All we know is it was decommissioned in twenty three seventy two, and the Enterprise F launched in twenty three eighty six, and as far as we know, it is still boldly floating out there today. You know, as episodes go, this was a fun one, and it was one that I had wanted to do for a long time, and not because I'm some secret trekkie who's quietly ashamed to ever discuss it publicly, so he chooses to discuss it occasionally on the Internet. I just really love the idea of comparing and contrasting a real life disaster against its fictional counterparts, in this case, three enterprises across two different universes, from the wooden deck of a Continental Navy sloop to the flight deck of the world's largest aircraft carrier to the bridge of a Galaxy class starship. The repeated use of the name is no accident, and her legacy, all the way from the age of wind and sail through the nuclear age, is already guaranteed. With the ninth and future USS Enterprise CVN eighty under construction as we speak, she will be the third Gerald R. Ford class supercarrier. She's about twenty percent bigger than the last enterprise, and she is scheduled for launch in the early twenty thirties, and we wish her well. The only thing I couldn't figure out was whether Gene Roddenberry took any inspiration for his utterly disposable red shirts from the Ordnance handlers on board his namesake vessel. It's no secret red shirts don't do well. In fact, red shirts were up to five times more likely to die than Gold and Blue crew members across the original run of his show. He murdered about thirty two red uniformed crew members on an off screen. If you want to help keep you your favorite podcaster from dying off screen, did you know the best way to help is just to share the show? I'm serious. The more the show grows, the more likely we will eventually find a business tycoon who will put me in their will. Failing that, there's always buy me a coffee. Dot com slash doomsday. It's a fine way to say, hey, here's a digital clink in your cup for all the laughs and vomit. And if you think any episodes a little early with no sponsor interruptions and ridiculously interesting material, in each new episode is worth it. You can find out more at patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo. And now I want to offer a quick but extremely heartfelt shutout to Lucas, Megan Ryder, Dana Crumb, Autumn, and Kevin Laar, Monica Rameikita. I hope I pronounced that correctly, and Francisco I's aguier. I also hope I pronounced that correctly. And I'm going to tell you something. When I see a new person join and their last name looks like a typo, I love it. I love it. I love finding a new supporter from a part of the world that I know so little about, and by virtue can't wait to visit on the show. So Monica and Francisco specifically, thank you. That was fun. And I just want to take a minute here to say how much I appreciate the people that support this show. And yeah, obviously I have said a million times there is no show without the support, but in this case, support is not even a strong enough term to describe what has happened. You have gone above and beyond. If you're not on my Patreon, you don't get access to a lot of my personal life. So you probably don't know that I was in the hospital twice in the last week. So I apologize for the slow pace of these episodes. And how do I even say this? My listeners chipped in to help buy a new mobile studio and command center for the show. They helped me sort out a minor medical emergency behind the scenes. They helped encourage me in ways that I always tried to do for them as well. It's really reciprocated. I mean, you grow up to make a show where you get to kill people every episode and you feel pretty good about it, and then you meet your listeners and they kind of become your heroes. So it's difficult for me to say thank you without sounding like Kirk trying to finish his way through Spock's eulogy. If you'd like to reach out to me for any reason, you can get me through Twitter or Instagram or Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can fire me an email to doomsdaypodat gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank all my Patreon listeners, new and old, for their support and encouragement. And I want to clarify now. When I say old I don't mean old timer's. I mean people who were able to support the show, even for a short time. It matters, it counts, and I appreciate what you did, and I always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Menic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. And I'm going to say something here that I've never really said about this before. I know it sounds like I'm reading a script, and it is I wrote it. I don't have any affiliation with Global Medic. I've never even spoken with them. The whole reason that I have spent the last five years pitching on their behalf to raise money to help people around the world is because it felt like the right thing to do. It's as simple as that. They are often the first and sometimes the only team that get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot CAA Oh God, here we go on the next episode. So you're minding your own business. You're sitting in your squalid, little nineteenth century hovel when you look out the window and you see a rumbling, brewing wave of liquid that smells strangely alcoholic and kool aidmns through your wall and pickles you dead ladies and gentlemen. On the next episode, we are doing another our first in podcast broadcast history. It's the two four Beer and Whiskey flood disaster drinking game of eighteen fourteen to eighteen seventy five. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and thanks for listening.